Search form

Troubled Projects Recovery

Troubled Projects Recovery Services

Although the root causes of any given problematic project are numerous, a troubled project can be generally defined as an initiative that is seriously late and/or over budget and or not delivering a significant part of the scope promised and /or experiencing serious challenges with respect to the final product quality.

As was mentioned earlier the causes are too numerous to list here, but the “usual suspects” typically are:

Lack of executive support

Lack of stakeholder participation

Lack of requirements elicitation, analysis and documentation

Poor change management

Unrealistic customer expectations with respect to the project budget and schedule, etc.

Sometimes Thinktank Consulting gets approached by the companies worldwide with the following problem: our project is experiencing serious issues and we would like you to come in and assess the project health and tell us what can be done to remedy the situation.

Unfortunately in almost every case I have to start at the very beginning of the project process. The project charter is examined (assuming, of course, there is a project charter!) to understand the following elements:

The purpose and the value of the project (i.e. why are you doing this?)

The triple constraints of the project including the high-level scope, budget, schedule and resources

Project risks, assumptions and constraints

Once these aspect have been studied and, if necessary reassessed, we move on to the Requirements Specifications document examination (again, if there is one) and try to determine whether the entire project scope has been captured in an accurate, consistent and unambiguous fashion. If that is not the case, the Requirements document has to be reworked.

The final stage of recovery involves replanning of the entire endeavor by reworking the Project Plan including the work breakdown structure, schedule, budget and other relevant sections of the document.